An further inquiry concerning constitutional irritation, and the pathology of the nervous system / by Benjamin Travers.

Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An further inquiry concerning constitutional irritation, and the pathology of the nervous system / by Benjamin Travers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Although the doctrine of habit or temperament, derived from these and similar agencies, was obscured by being mixed up with false and now obsolete no- tions respecting the humors, (as the blood, the pi- tuita, and the bile of different qualities were called, which were supposed to determine the habit by their properties and relative proportions in different indi- viduals,) yet the natural varieties of habit or tempera- ment are so marked, as to be acknowledged at the present day by every man of discernment, and to ex- ercise a very material influence over his practice. Who, for example, honestly requires an explanation of such terms applied to the habit as phlegmatic or leucophlegmatic, indolent or irritable, robust or de- licate ? If at the dawn of medical knowledge, an erro- neous physiology bewildered with its numberless conjectures and combinations the results of ob- servation, Richerand and other modern physio- logists have surely refined overmuch in professing to individualize the temperaments with minute pre- cision. Nothing can be more idle than the attempt to restrict within definite boundaries features of dis- tinction, whether physical or moral, which by their constitution are, and ever must be, variable and adventitious; and can only be regarded as mo- difications, infinitely diversified, of a general or parent principle. Surveying the extreme types in their fullest breadth, we may deduce certain physical and moral associations which may serve as standards of character, but if they have the merit of fidelity, they will be limited to two or